Teaching coding is currently gaining momentum across the world to help young people develop technological fluency and deeper understanding of how the digital world is created, how it might be used to meet our needs, how we might repair or modify it. At the same time, the maker movement of independent innovators, designers and tinkerers has dynamically entered the landscape of innovative education and informal learning, offering an unprecedented opportunity for educators to advance a progressive educational agenda. Across the spectrum of these emerging creative learning activities, the elements of fun and playfulness are dominant harnessing children’s sense of joy, wonder and natural curiosity, achieving high levels of engagement and learner’s personal investment in learning. The links and contributions of these creative learning approaches and activities to science education are strong and obvious, albeit still only little explored and understood in depth.

The Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH participates in the COMnPLAY SCIENCE projectthat aims to help Europe better understand the new ways in which informal science learning is taking place through various coding, making, and play activities that young Europeans (children, adolescents and young adults) are nowadays increasingly engaged with, outside school and higher education science classrooms, beyond the formal boundaries of science education.

The COMnPLAY SCIENCE project is expected to substantially promote and support science education. The main results stemming from the project include:

• An online inventory of all the identified and pooled practices, appropriately categorized and annotated in the light of the findings of the research, available to stakeholders and the public.
• A Web-based game promoting and supporting the continuous prolonged engagement of learners and their facilitators in the field research.
• The COMnPLAY-Science Knowledge Kit, a modular set of reader-friendly, practice-oriented publications, encapsulating the findings of the project.
• The COMnPLAY-Science Roadmap for Europe, a detailed concerted account by the consortium, the stakeholder communities and policy makers of the potential for short-, medium- and long term impact of coding, making and play-based informal science learning.

Also, numerous public events (workshops, seminars, conferences, contests, fairs), often combined with training activities (winter and summer schools) will allow teachers, students, policy makers and the general public to become acquainted with these innovative practices which offer novel, extraordinary learning experiences.

The project’s kick-off meeting took place on the 18^th and 19^th of June 2018 at the Gløshaugen Campus of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

The COMnPLAY SCIENCE has a 3-year duration and has received 3,1M€ funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Topic: Scienceeducationoutsidetheclassroom). The consortium consists of 11 partners from 10 European countries

• Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway (coordinator)
• University of Oulu, Finland           
• Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, Greece
• Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands              
• Uppsala University, Sweden         
• Technical University of Munich, Germany
• University of Malta, Malta           
• Design for Change initiative, Spain            
• ovos media GmbH, Austria
• King’s College London, UK           
• Science Museum Group, UK

Websites and Social Media:

WebSite: http://comnplayscience.eu

Facebook: https://fb.me/ComNPlayScience

Twitter: @comnplayscience